As a dedicated chip designer, Dr. Sudip Shekhar had settled into one of this sector’s most appealing locales. He was a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Labs, Intel’s research division in Hillsboro, Oregon, among the few places in the industry where a manufacturer still conducts basic design research. He felt privileged to have the resources […]

Killam Scholarship Supports Research in Experimental Chip Design Between microwave and infrared wavelengths is a tantalizing portion of the spectrum known as terahertz (THz), T-rays or submillimetre wavelengths. Ranging between 300 gigahertz to 3 terahertz this part of the spectrum is compelling for researchers because it has an array of potentially useful properties that […]

One aspect of being a teaching assistant that Parisa Behnamfar really enjoys is the active teaching and learning that happens during lab supervision hours. “Experimental setups usually bring up challenges, contradictions, discussions and eventually solutions. During the labs, I share my knowledge with passion which also enhance my confidence about the concepts that I am […]

Prof. Steve Wilton, together with recently graduated PhD student Eddie Huang and undergraduate student Al-Shahna Jamal, received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology for their submission titled, Maximum Flow Algorithms for Maximum Observability During FPGA Debug. Prof. Wilton and his team work in the System-on-Chip Laboratory at ECE. The paper describes techniques to […]

Welcome to SoC at UBC!

System-on-a-chip (SoC) is a major revolution taking place in the design of integrated circuits due to the unprecedented levels of integration possible. As a result, new methodologies and tools are demanded to address design, verification and test problems presented by SoC’s in this rapidly evolving area. Our research addresses high-speed design using a “System-on-a-chip with Intellectual Property” (SoC/IP) methodology.

The key concept in SoC/IP design is that a chip can be constructed rapidly using third-party and internal IP, where IP refers to a pre-designed behavioral or physical descriptions of a standard component. According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, “Innovation in the techniques used in circuit and system design will be essential to maintain the historical trends in performance improvement.” Because of the strategic importance of SoC/IP design in the years ahead, our goal is to train the next generation of chip designers in SoC design from systems to silicon. The research program is focused on mixed-signal SoC design, verification and test.

The SoC program at UBC involves a number of faculty members in ECE and CS, and partnerships with Canadian Microelectronic Corporation (CMC), PMC-Sierra and other companies involved in SoC design.